Abraham “Avi” Loeb & UFO Project

Abraham “Avi” Loeb got the idea to hunt for aliens from cable TV. In June 2021, Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, was at home, watching NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on CNN talking about recent UFO incidents involving U.S. Navy pilots. “Do you think we have been contacted by extraterrestrials?” the CNN interviewer asked. Nelson hedged, then said he was “turning to our scientists” to find out what the pilots saw.

UFOs were big news at the time. Outlets from The New York Times to 60 Minutes had run stories on shadowy objects that appear to dart and dance in grainy video clips taken by Navy jet pilots. On 25 June, shortly after Nelson mused about the footage on CNN, the Pentagon issued a report on nearly 2 decades’ worth of the “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—the government’s preferred new term for UFOs. It said the objects were likely to be drones, weather-related phenomena, or artifacts of sensor glitches. On the other hand, it said that, in some cases, the objects “appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center poll that month found that half of Americans believed aliens were steering the UFOs.

Loeb, already obsessed with a mysterious interstellar object that whizzed through the Solar System in 2017, sensed an opportunity. Immediately after seeing Nelson on CNN, he emailed NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen to propose a government-funded UFO study. Later that day, the two spoke over the phone, and Loeb says Zurbuchen was “supportive” of the idea. But Loeb never heard back after that. He quickly pivoted to private funding. His first lucky strike came when Eugene Jhong, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Harvard alum who had heard Loeb talking about aliens on a podcast, offered up $1 million, no strings attached.

In July, Loeb unveiled the Galileo Project, which he says was designed in the spirit of the revolutionary Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. (The tagline is “Daring to look through new telescopes.”) The overarching goal of the $1.8 million project is to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and one branch is traditional: analyzing possible interstellar objects spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories. More controversial is the construction of a network of rooftop cameras designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth’s atmosphere. After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project—as well as some notorious nonscientists—Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. “Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,” Loeb says.

- More Here (Galileo Project Website)

Naughty Neo!

 

Stockdale Paradox

• The Stockdale Paradox is a concept that was popularized by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great.

• In the most simplest explanation of this paradox, it's the idea of hoping for the best, but acknowledging and preparing for the worst.

• The ability to acknowledge your situation and balance optimism with realism comes from an understanding of the Stockdale Paradox. This contradictory way of thinking was the strength that led James through those trying years. Such paradoxical thinking, whether you consciously know it or not has been one of the defining philosophies for great leaders making it through hardship and reaching their goals. 

- More Here

On Eating Animals

Eating meat is bad for animals, the planet, and humanity — and, despite what they may think, it’s especially bad for the men themselves.

If we replace “meat” with any other food item, the absurdity of our circumstance becomes obvious. Imagine, for a moment, if men felt the same way about cantaloupes. Imagine if we lived in a world where men arbitrarily coveted cantaloupes as a source of masculine energy. Imagine if men prepared bowls of cantaloupe to comfort themselves whenever their manhood was questioned. Imagine if men who chose not to eat cantaloupes were viewed as feminine and meek, and men who consumed all-cantaloupe diets were admired as alpha males. We live at the same heights of insanity, we’re just too acclimated to notice our altitude.

This bizarre male obsession with meat might seem to be a harmless expression of fragility, but it has real consequences. Meat consumption is the number one cause of animal cruelty worldwide, and eating animals is a contributing factor to climate change, world hunger, antibiotics resistance, deforestation, worker exploitation, indigenous land theft, pollution, mass extinction, water usage, zoonotic diseases — I could go on. If cantaloupes were causing these problems, would they still be on the shelves?

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Ironically, meat isn’t even good for the traits we usually define as masculine. Testosterone levels — perhaps more than any other measurable, physical trait — are synonymous with masculinity in the popular imagination. This is understandable since testosterone is what causes males to develop deeper voices, facial hair, increased muscular strength, as well as higher sperm production and sex drive; if anything physical can be called “manly,” testosterone can. And yet, despite what one might expect, vegans have higher testosterone than meat-eaters: A large study published in the British Journal of Cancer showed that vegan men have 13% higher testosterone levels than omnivorous ones. From a hormonal perspective, vegan men are the manliest on earth.

Despite this evidence, Dr. Shawn Baker — a famous advocate of Jordan Peterson’s carnivore diet, who has made a career out of attacking vegans online — has proudly suggested that an all-meat diet may increase testosterone. And in the past, he has argued that the drop in American male testosterone levels since the 1970s is possibly caused by the corresponding reduction in red meat intake over that same interval.

He has since stopped making this argument, and it’s no mystery why. Baker recently took a blood test that showed his own testosterone levels had plummeted on an all-meat diet. It turns out, eating dead animals wasn’t the best thing for his manhood. He reacted in a blog post as follows:

I tested a early am testosterone back in January low and behold, it was shockingly low!! 227 ng/dL. This falls below the normal range of 270–1070. How can this be as you are a big strong, lean guy who supposedly has excellent sexual function (I checked and I do). So how is this possible?

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Our goal as humans should not be to merely align our behavioral decisions with the stereotypes of whatever sex or gender we happen to be. Instead, we should seek to behave in a way that reduces meaningless misery and brings joy to ourselves and the lives of others.

- More Here

Magawa - The Hero Rat Passes Away

Small step in moral progress for humans. All major new papers covered the death of Magawa. 

Lessons from Magawa is yet another reason for us to eliminate the pain and suffering we cause on rats for medical research.

Thank you, Magawa. History will not forget you.

In a five-year career, the rodent sniffed out over 100 landmines and other explosives in Cambodia.

Magawa was the most successful rat trained by the Belgian charity Apopo to alert human handlers about the mines so they can be safely removed.

The charity said the African giant pouch rat "passed away peacefully" at the weekend.

It said Magawa was in good health and "spent most of last week playing with his usual enthusiasm". But by the weekend "he started to slow down, napping more and showing less interest in food in his last days".

[---]

Trained to detect a chemical compound within the explosives, Magawa cleared more than 141,000 square metres (1,517,711 sq ft) of land - the equivalent of 20 football pitches.

He weighed 1.2kg (2.6lb) and was 70cm (28in) long. While that is far larger than many other rat species, Magawa was still small enough and light enough that he did not trigger mines if he walked over them.

Magawa was capable of searching a field the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes - something Apopo says would take a person with a metal detector between one and four days.

In 2020, Magawa was awarded the PDSA Gold Medal - sometimes described as the George Cross for animals - for his "life-saving devotion to duty". He was the first rat to be given the medal in the charity's 77-year history.

- More Here and this the HeroRat project

Issues With "Disgust"

Martha C. Nussbaum has written this brilliant and insightful piece on.. disgust (why sapiens hate their bodies) and that emotion unleashes so much pain and suffering in this world esp., for non-human animals.

In a world that is obsessed with politics to space not too many are aware that disgust is actually an emotion leave alone Darwin to Paul Rozin to Jonathan Haidt have done ground breaking work on this least understood emotion of ours. 

Hating bodies is a form of self-hatred and leads to hatred of others, human and (non-human) animal. Hating what you yourself are is already pointless and makes for unhappiness. But it is worse still when we know that projective disgust is almost certain to follow. Body-haters are bound to find some surrogate for the animal, the bodily, in themselves, whether it be a racial group, a gender or sexual group, or the aging, who come in for a tremendous amount of body-hatred all over the world.

One particularly significant reason to avoid the projective form of body-hatred is the way it has distorted and poisoned our relationship to the other animals. When humans imagine themselves as essentially immaterial, and therefore “above” the animal (whatever that means), it is no surprise if they neglect the profound kinship that human animals have with other animals. And so it has happened. The other animals are thought of as base and disgusting, and the imputation that we have evolved from animal origins meets with inflamed resistance. Our public debates about teaching evolution in the schools — and whether some other fictional non-theory (creationism, intelligent design) may also be taught as an alternative — are often accompanied with expressions of disgusted incredulity that we wonderful humans could really have apes for ancestors.

With the fiction of the incorporeal driving a wedge between us and all other animal species, we can all the more nonchalantly treat them as if they were nothing. Since I think our torture and exploitation of other animals is a great moral evil, I would like to point out that things would almost certainly not have reached the present stage of cruelty and neglect but for our lies about who we are — our erroneous view that we are not their fellows and family members, but some spiritual stuff floating around somewhere, in or with a body but essentially not of it.

[---]

Let us consider other highly intelligent animals. Elephants fear death, and seek to avoid it for self and others, and even, as we now know, grieve the loss of loved ones with rituals of mourning. Mother elephants even sacrifice their lives to protect their young from speeding trains. That is how vividly they see death ahead of them, and how bad they think it is. But they stop short of body-hatred. They do not adopt a distorted attitude to their potentially crumbling frames that leads to projective aggression against other groups of elephants.

Do not say, please, that it is because they are less aware. We are finding out more all the time about their communication systems, their social organization, their capacious and nuanced awareness. But we do not find disgust. That pathology appears to be ours alone. In her beautiful memoir, Coming of Age With Elephants, Joyce Poole, one of our greatest elephant researchers, describes the way in which her human community impeded her “coming of age” as a fulfilled woman and mother. The researcher group was highly misogynistic and racist. They deliberately broke up her happy romance with an African man. When she was raped by a stranger, they treated her as soiled and did nothing to deal with her trauma. In elephant society, by contrast, she observed better paradigms of inclusive friendship, of compassionate and cooperative group care. The memoir ends when she returns to the elephant group after a two-year absence, carrying her infant child in her arms. The matriarchal herd not only recognize her, they understand her new happiness. And they greet her with the ceremony of trumpeting and defecating by which elephants greet the birth of a new elephant child. No body-hatred, no disgust, no projective subordinations.

Are we humans, by contrast, doomed to some type of body-hatred, particularly as we age? There are many reasons to think so. The hatred of aging human bodies by younger humans, so common in American culture, is already a form of self-avoidance, of denial that this is every person’s own future. And as we begin to get there, a trip to the doctor can produce not just ordinary anxiety but a disgust with the whole business of bodies. In the early days of the feminist movement, the book Our Bodies, Ourselves proclaimed women’s proud independence of body-hatred. We will not be told by society that women’s body parts and their fluids are disgusting. We will not be tutored into that self-loathing idea. We will learn to celebrate our fluids, to contemplate them with a speculum, to get to know our female insides. We will learn to give birth without anesthesia, as ourselves, rather than allowing our child to be extracted from us in an unfeeling state by an impatient doctor.

The Sociological Imagination

Repost from 2012 blog entry - excerpts for Wright Mill's 1959 book The Sociological Imagination; it's brilliant, just brilliant:

"The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.

The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove."

[--]

"That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity's self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences."

First Successful Xenotransplantation!

The center announced Monday evening that surgeons there successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease.  The patient, David Bennett, was too sick to qualify for a human donor and had run out of other options.

In the decades-long effort to make xenotransplantation a reality, the new report differed from October’s in key respects. Most glaringly, the patient at NYU was already brain-dead. Doctors sutured a porcine kidney to the outside of her body and could only track whether the patient immediately rejected the foreign organ. As predicted by years of monkey experiments, she didn’t.

The new procedure may offer the first test of whether porcine organs, when bred with the right battery of genetic edits, can actually serve as a replacement or supplement to human organ donation and allow patients to live functional lives.

[---]

The news comes as xenotransplantation, after years on the medical margin, appeared to be inching closer to reality, potentially offering an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of patients in the US and around the world waiting for organs. After a high-profile attempt to transplant a baboon heart into a baby with a congenital heart defect failed in 1983, researchers and several companies tried to use recombinant DNA techniques to make pigs with organs that humans can accept.

- More Here 

The sad news is that they are using living pigs for this but hopefully in near future, they can create just "pig heart"in lab without actual pigs. I hope. 

The good news is - now there is concrete example for the morons who eat bacon to understand and open their eyes to see how pigs are genetically, physically and emotionally close to sapiens. 

Virtuous E.O. Wilson

I don't remember reading this 2009 E.O.Wilson's interview by Alice Dreger and now while reading this, it makes sense why I admire him so much.  He went through so many obstacles and conflicts though out his life but he never lost his sense of civility. Thank you sir!

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

[---]

As for me, I don’t know why, but I just get calm under a lot of stress. I’ve been in that sort of stressful situation many times, especially in the field. I started thinking to myself, this is probably going to be an historical moment, and it is very interesting. I wasn’t in the least doubt that my science was correct. I knew this was a kind of aberration. I understood the source because I knew the people who had been the chief thinkers, the ideological leaders. An astonishingly good percentage of them were on the faculty at Harvard. I wasn’t concerned this would come to anything in the long term.

So, someone found a paper towel and I dried my head. As soon as things settled down, I just read my talk. I knew things were going to work out—there was so much evidence accumulated already for a somewhat programmed human brain. By then, it was already coming from many directions, including genetics and neuroscience. There was no doubt about where things would go. There may be hold-outs but the inevitable conclusion from neuroscience and anthropology and genetics is for this way of thinking. [American anthropologist] Nap[oleon] Chagnon was present and he was certainly a leader in thinking about human nature and how valuable it is, and what its motivations are, by studying groups like the Yanomamö.

I knew history was on my side. I was young enough that I thought I would live through a good part of it. I was annoyed! But I wasn’t under stress in an extreme way. Before going home, I went to the next session, at which an anthropologist made the mistake of stating that I believe every cultural difference has a genetic basis, so that I am a racist. Of course, I rebutted that, but that was the kind of thing being exchanged at that meeting.

[---]

Alice Dreger: Nap is finishing up his memoir, but I’m not sure he is going to situate his story in that larger context, of what happens in cases like that.

Edward O. Wilson: I’m glad you’re working on this. It all needs to be put it in a larger context. That would be a wonderful thing to do. I don’t know if you want to come right up to the Bush administration and the Evangelical advances, the know-nothings’ attacks on science. We have to decide what to do in these situations. I chose to write The Creation. In that book, I set out not to confound the fundamentalists—that’s been done a thousand times, virtually without effect—but rather to call on them for help. That had far more effect on Evangelicals than a hundred volumes by someone like Richard Dawkins condemning religion. I just brushed that aside, said I was a secular humanist, and began with a letter to an imaginary pastor. I said we are not going to save life on Earth unless science and religion can work together.

Alice Dreger: One of the things I really admire about your work is how you try to be constructive. I think that is so much more effective than mere criticism—you work on really moving people to act, to go beyond long-term divisions to ask how we can get somewhere.

Edward O. Wilson: I think that work has been very productive. It helped move Evangelicals more decisively into conservation. Once they see what they call “the Left,” the environmentalists and the scientists—what Rush Limbaugh, that expert on climate change, has called “the granola-crunching tree-huggers”—are not necessarily the dangerous threat they thought, they are not as aggressive. I understand Evangelicals well. They circle the wagons, but they are afraid of all these happenings. Once they see they could form a non-threatening alliance for a transcendent purpose, then they could move forward. That’s why I wrote the book. You have 42 percent of the American people who might be rallied for the environment, particularly for conservation. So, that’s made a lot of progress. I was invited to a meeting with the heads of the Mormon Church, and we met at the president’s office.

[---]

Alice Dreger: I have noticed that about you and your work. You tend to be productive and civil. Personality seems to matter a lot in these controversies. To use a term that some anthropologists or psychologists use, I would say that it is “characterological.” Some people are, well, shall we say, warriors, and that makes them more likely to get into scrapes. You tend to try to be conciliatory, productive, and especially civil.

Edward O. Wilson: I like to say I’m a southerner. I felt somehow it was bred into me that I should be a gentleman and I expect others to be the same. But I quickly learned, as I say in The Creation, that if you use moderation, and reserve, and courtesy, you’ll be the victor in any vicious fight. You also have to have the answers and the truth on your side. But I felt like that’s the winning strategy. I think it is an honest strategy, too. I felt the Evangelicals are good people, and I’ve always asked myself how to deal with people like this who I like in every respect. They’re smart, they’re good, and there is a certain area that says “keep out.” How do you handle that?

Alice Dreger: Imagine for a moment that you are watching a younger version of yourself struggle with a younger version of Gould and Lewontin. How would you advise that younger version of you?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I would tell him to ignore it. Pay attention, I mean, and respond if there is some really scurrilous thing being said. But, as much as possible, ignore it, and keep working, and you’ll win in the end. I know it isn’t easy during fights. I always said to myself, “Don’t get into a pissing contest with a skunk.” If you ask me what I most resent about that period looking back now, I think the answer is the amount of time I wasted. I spent countless hours talking with journalists who were writing stories about all this. They’d come to me and say, “Well, Professor Lewontin just said so-and-so, Professor Gould just said so-and-so.” Or, “I’ve read in the latest thing that they’ve said this. What do you say to that?” I felt that I couldn’t sit by and let them declare me to be a racist and a proto-Nazi. I couldn’t just say, “No comment.” So, I wasted enormous amounts of energy and time I could have used for something much more valuable. So, my advice would be, this too shall pass. Ignore it as much as you can. Conduct yourself with dignity and with courtesy and let it pass.

 

Elks & Curious Fluffy !

 

And she is front of the television!

What Makes Me Angry?

There is only one reason for my anger. Only one. 

When people honestly believe they are doing "mundane" things or choosing "mundane" choices or talk "mundane" talks without realizing the unbelievable objective pain and suffering they unleash. Until that point I am not angry but once I explain what they unleash and they don't act on it - that's when my pessimism for sapiens explodes. 

Honestly, I don't get angry even during those moments much since Max passed away and I think, its because my expectations from sapiens is pretty much at abyss expect those beautiful unknown faces who try untiringly to reduce pain and sufferings in this blue planet. They do so without any exceptions. 

Constantly being mindful and aware of doing nothing Bad is much easier than trying hard to do Good.